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In his 2001Different: Contemporary Photography and Black IdentityStuart Hall, writing on black arts in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, commented on the emergence of the “black body” as a subject of visibility and identity which challenged the racialised body which for so long had been produced and reproduced by racial discourse. “On the site of the body”, he wrote, “racial discourses had long undertaken the work of systematically reducing history to biology, culture to nature”, but it was also a “surface … of resistance from which alternative counter-narratives can be produced”. Cultural identities have histories and are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture, and power. This paper will: (1) document the history of how artists, photographers, and filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s deconstructed and challenged the stereotyped black body of racialised discourse to produce counter-visual narratives of the “black body”; (2) map the different mechanisms through which these counter-visual narratives were presented, circulated, discussed, appropriated, and used; (3) explore how the history of these counter-visual narratives “intertwined and overlapped” with the history of the broader “politics of representation” and anti-racist politics in education in particular; and (4) finally determine how successful these counter-visual narratives were in displacing the racialised black body in and of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a weapon of propaganda, and the Spanish Republican Government deployed visual imagery to great effect as an instrument through which it exhibited its progressive educational and welfare reforms to an international audience. This article focuses on the visual and textual representations of displaced children in Republican educational colonies in Spain that are preserved in British archive collections. Taking as its starting point a series of photographs of children in colonies gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London, the paper will consider the construction, use, and circulation of these images and associated texts by British and American political and humanitarian networks and their subsequent collection and preservation in British archival institutions. The paper will assess the effectiveness of the images and texts as pedagogical and political agents and explore how their meaning shifted as they travelled through a range of performative spaces on a journey from their construction as artefacts designed initially to record and communicate the Spanish Republic’s progressive educational project, to commemorative objects in the archive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In both England and Japan, art education was viewed as having nothing to do with self-expression, but was considered to be an efficient means for industrial development. In England, it was designed to train the eyes and hands of artisans. The art critic Ruskin has often been referred to in the context of the transition to self-expression in the history of art education. This article shows, however, that Ruskin was not an advocate of self-expression. In Japan, drawing was introduced into the general education curriculum at the beginning of the Meiji era, and the aim of that instruction was to train the students' eyes and hands. In response to this trend, the Free Drawing Movement was introduced by Kanae Yamamoto. He attempted to introduce the methods of creation used by professional artists into general education. But this aspect was neglected by both his supporters and opponents, and Yamamoto has been presented instead as an advocate of self-expression. Drawing on the genealogical approach, as developed by Foucault, this paper re-examines this well-known history of art education. By replacing Ruskin and Yamamoto in the historical context of the transition of art education in two respective countries, the genealogy of self-expression will be revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

R.H. Tawney (1880–1962), a leading English economic historian and prominent socialist, was vigorously involved in educational reconstruction during the Second World War. For Tawney, the war was a war for social democracy. His ideals of social democracy formed a basis for his case for Public (independent) School reform and free secondary education for all. Despite this, the connection between Tawney’s ideals and his perspectives on educational issues has not been addressed fully by historians and thus there has been a lack of a proper explanation for his often criticised sympathy for the public schools and his indifference towards the multilateral school. Hence, this paper aims to re-examine the link between them in greater depth. It concludes that, according to Tawney’s ideals of social democracy, the abolition of the public schools was not necessary for the establishment of a democratic educational system. Moreover, Tawney did not launch an attack on the tripartite system proposed by the Norwood Report of 1943 since it was not against his ideal of equality as long as different secondary schools were equal in quality and status. Equality, he believed, must be advanced through the raising of the school leaving age to 16 and the abolition of fees in all secondary schools. Thus, he laid more emphasis on the school leaving age and tuition fees than on the multilateral school. In brief, on various issues pertaining to secondary education, Tawney’s opinions and actions were deeply grounded in his distinctive ideals of social democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As part of its stated mission to Christianise Britain, from its earliest years the BBC broadcast religious programmes intended for a child audience. Directed at sites domestic and educational, these broadcasts constituted a means of the mediatisation of religion for children. This paper explores the work of the pioneer children’s religious broadcaster John G. Williams, the nature and character of childhood religion and its nurture espoused by him whilst at the BBC, and as an educationist in the years following the 1944 Education Act. Setting a close reading of Williams’ views on childhood religion and school worship alongside those of a later critique, from the religious educationist John Hull in hisSchool Worship: An Obituary(1975), this article argues that the differences between these two religious educators illustrate fracture lines occurring between religious education in the home, school and broadcast spaces in the long 1960s. Additionally, the historical evidence presented here provides a nuanced understanding of mediatisation as a process, indicating that other social processes in any national context, for example de-Christianisation in the English one, disrupt media logic. Finally, further research is called for on the historical intersections of religious education, and schools and religious broadcasting, as well as the more recent effects of broadcast collective worship in mediatising religion for children. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following its late nineteenth-century emergence as an important element within federalist thinking across the British Empire, the idea of Greater Britain lost much of its political force in the years following the Boer War. The concept however continued to retain considerable residual currency in other fields of Imperial debate, including those concerning policies and practices of education across the Empire. This paper explores aspects of such debate by examining the intellectual contexts, theoretical assertions and conceptual formulations deployed in relation to questions about education, leadership, Imperial unity and racial identity in the early twentieth century. These issues are illuminated by an analysis of proposals by the Imperial theorist E.B. Sargant for the educational “colonisation” of the Empire of white settlement by “daughter” schools transposed from the traditional public schools of the metropole and staffed by teachers conceived as “the regulars of the State”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The business side of the Lancasterian system of mass schooling has been highlighted by some researchers. However, this feature is usually considered of minor importance compared to other dimensions of that system, namely the social control role of popular education in early nineteenth-century Britain. The present surge of projects and mechanisms directed to capitalist valorisation within public education systems provides an enhanced relevance to the study of past experiments with similar meaning and content. In this paper, I seek to understand the processes of educational production and capital valorisation in the Lancasterian undertaking. Succinctly as it may be, I refer to initiatives originated in the Benthamite circle in support of the Lancasterian system and aimed at extending it to superior branches of knowledge and to other social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the late sixteenth century, in response to the problem of how best to teach children to read, a variety of texts, such as primers, spellers and readers were produced in England for vernacular instruction. This paper describes how these materials were used by teachers to develop, first, a specific religious understanding according to the stricture of the time and, second, a moral reading practice that provided the child with a guide to secular conduct. The analysis focuses on the use of these texts as a productive means for shaping the child-reader in the context of newly emerging educational spaces, which fostered a particular, morally formative relation among teacher, child and text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the special issue by offering a new framework in time periods that demonstrates the changing nature of the intellectual transfer to and from colonial India and to posit the imperatives that drove these changes. It shows that the nature of educational exchange in India was transformed in elemental ways during the colonial phase. And that this transformation ultimately produced an intellectual separation between East and West; a separation that pre-empted what was to happen on the broader canvas of Indian national politics in the early twentieth century. For studies such as this one the state remains paradigmatic. The colonial experience in India was highly nuanced as indigenous collaborators, settler societies and ex-patriots formed networks of exchange that fed into the empire at large. Understanding this complexity is essential groundwork for better analysing broader networks that transcended nation and empire, metropole and colony. Colonial rule valorised particular institutional forms of education, some imported from the “home” country, some from other domains, as part of the uneven process of empire-building. In reaction to this the nationalist struggle did not construct its own educational idiom, it adapted the one already shaped by experimentation and imposition mostly created by the Empire at Home/Empire Abroad relationship of the colonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]